Grafting non dormant wood

General Fruit Growing
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I have seen some utube vids in which grafting is done in July and August with scions taken off curently leafed out trees.

Its like taking bud grafting to another level. Instead of just taking the buds, an entire scion with 3 - 5 buds has the leaves removed and grafted just like a dormant scion.

Has anyone had any experience like this. Link right below

In this one the graft starts on August 1 and by August 30 there is 12 inches of growth.

This grafting results on steroids. More importantly, it could mean a savings of an entire year to get fruiting.

Are there perhaps ways to do stuff that we don’t do because we assume they would not work? Has that kept us in a sort of a box of “settled” orthodoxy?

Mike

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Interested in this topic and following. I have wondered, similarly to planting trees in the “wrong” season (specifically summer), that if you just provide enough water and support, will the grafts still do well?

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yeah, late-season grafting is possible–apart from being the last resort–especially if one receives hard-to-find budwood later in the year and wouldn’t want to waste them. Here in vegas, one may still graft in >110F.

bark-grafting will yield the highest success rates, especially in hot weather, because sap flow from a thick stump is more voluminous.

the rationale behind removing the mature leaves is to effectively curtail moisture losses via transpiration. Foliage size of the scionwood(hence transpiration surface area) was determined by sap flow and amount of sunlight the stem(while on the mother tree) was getting. If that stem is removed from the tree to be used as scionwood for grafting, sapflow to the leaves may no longer be enough due to the compromised interface of scion and rootstock, versus transpiration losses due to wider surface area of leaf, so it is best to remove the leaves, and just have the scionwood grow its own foliage, and the sizes of which would then be determined by amount of sap it is receiving from the rootstock to which it is now grafted to. Leaf size and subsequent growth will thus be correlated to amount of moisture the buds will be getting from the rootstock.

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forgot to add, that apart from providing a more voluminous sapflow, a stump will also be in “do-or-die” mode , so graft-rejection is less likely to occur, compared to, say, grafting those stems to same-caliper stems on a rootstock tree’s canopy. The hormonal effects of a rootstock tree(with a full canopy) on grafted budwood won’t be as “desperate” compared to one where a large portion of the canopy was decapitated, and the only buds that the tree can rely on(relative to size of rootball) will be those on the budwood.

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It seems to me this would be hard on the Rootstock.
Around here WV. The general belief is if you want to kill a tree, you cut it in late July - August .
The only grafting I do that time of year is budding , buds forced the next spring. No removal of top growth in August.
Wonder where that video was made ?

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intriguing, right? The majority of drupes and pomes originated from china, as well as in bordering kazakhstan-- hence the northern hemisphere. And the majority of named cultivars and interspecifics were developed in no. hemisphere as well. So practically all jujubes/apples/peaches currently farmed in australia and south africa had initially been grafted in the wrong season when such cultivars were first imported to those countries. Either that, or the scionwood were kept in storage several months more, to wait for spring in the southern hemisphere.

conversely, australian- developed apple cultivars as pink lady and granny smith suffered through the same counter-seasonal “jet lag”

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@Hillbillyhort

Northern hemisphere. Russia

Mike

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I have tried this myself to. Also in july/august.

I wrapped the whole scion in parafilm. And painted it white. And another one loosly wrapped with alluminium foil. Did both bark and normal W&T grafts.

I paid extra attention to the small bud development of the 0 year old shoots i used. I only used the bottom of the shoot and not the top. (did it with apples and asian pears)

It did sprout new leaves for me. But no new shoot growth in the year of grafting.
I think if i had a longer growing season. Or completly headed the tree it might have grown more in year of grafting.

I have my doubts it will save you a whole year though. The growth of a tree grafted like this in august vs in the winter before, will lagg behind in my mind. I think it might give you an extra half a season of growth. Might be enough to put you over the edge to get fruits earlier. Might not.

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I did it a few years ago with some apple rootstock where the initial graft failed to take. I had initially grafted 2-3 year old growth. I placed the second attempts in shade under a grape vine and they finally showed signs of growth in July. I think I re-grafted in June. I think if you keep fighting with the grafts they will take. i.e., new growth, bud graft, cleft graft, bark graft. It is a way to save a year if you have access to the fresh material you want to graft

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I bud citrus trees every year in the fall Sept 15-first frost using current bud wood here in Texas near Houston. Best time to bud. The buds stay dormant thru the winter and then in the spring the buds are 3-4 weeks ahead of spring buds. Usually it is 90F+. I believe most commercial growers of citrus do the same. If any buds don’t take then spring re-budding for them. Persimmons only in the spring.

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Thank you for mentioning this. I will plan to keep a bud from my scion wood to re- graft any that don’t take. Hopefully I don’t have to worry about it for too many trees.

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I successfully did a pear clef graft July 7th with freshly cut scion.
I did a peach graft last year early Oct using a freshly cut 12 inch branch. I won’t know until the spring if it worked.

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@oscar @Masbustelo

I found a few more of his videos. In the english subtiles you see he gives pretty detailed explanations of what/why he is doing.
His utube ID is Земляк if you want to find more of him.

By the way, in the subtitles “grafting” is translated into “vaccination”

In the first:
On June 5, 2019 he grafts a fully leafed 1/2 inch thick scion which is obviously a 2nd or 3rd year growth into the trunk bark of an old gnarly apple tree. By July 26, 2019 (51 days) he has 45 centimeters (17 inches) of growth.

In the second:
On June 15, 2020 he grafts a fully leafed apricot scion and by June 30 ( 2 weeks!!) he has established very good growth.

In the third: Its a plum in August

in the fourth
It is a Appricot and peach multigraft.

I am NOT putting this up to throw any shade on anyone else or on other methods and practices of doing this. I am doing this is because these turned my grafting knowledge universe" topsy turvy and now maybe I, and others, can be less nervous about grafting:

NOTE:

  1. All of these are done with actively growing current year’s scion wood.
  2. His methods are definitely not as “surgical” as our practices. He does not have a super sharp, single bevel, Swiss/German/Japanese surgical steel blade.(see the video). I think he borrowed one of his knives from Conan the Barbarian.
  3. He grafts onto any area of the tree where he can find cambium to cambium contact.

Notice the huge amount of new growth he gets in 2-6 weeks? I always thought that bud or “T” grafts were ‘forget it til next year and hope you did it right’.

Some of the subtitle translations go by pretty quickly but at the end of the video I posted in my original post, he points to a piece of plywood and says he put it on the “north, to keep the graft warm”.

MY TAKEAWAY: If apples form fruiting buds on 2 year old wood, you just got one year old wood in one month and if peaches, plums and apricots do it on last years wood, you graft today and have fruit next year; neat! Oh, and the mysterious is a little less mysterious.

Hope this helps in stress reduction

Mike

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@MES111 Mike What do you think that clay or putty is that he uses?

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@Masbustelo

It is translated as “plastique”. If you look at the vid in the original post, when he applies it, a word in Russian is flashed on the screen as well as the english word “plastique”.

I assume it is some sort of sealant. We have those too including bee’s wax, or any other grafting wax

Mike

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You can buy Summer bud wood from Fruitwood Nursery. I successfully grafted peach and plum during the 3rd week of August. I used T bud, and V grafts. I left some leaves growing below the graft until it went dormant. The buds produces 1-2 pairs of 1/2" leaves, but did not branch out until Spring.

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Last June was my first t-bud/chip bud attempt on a few stone fruits. After 3-4 weeks, I tried to force the buds but most didn’t put on any growth. I thought all of them failed. Now, literally all of them are waking up and putting on new growth - even the ones on peach that was budded way down (I hear this doesn’t work for grafts on peaches). Interestingly, I had an extra stick of Black Tartarian last summer and instead of throwing it away, I cleft grafted it to tree. Again, the same experience - it sat there without any sign of life and it looks like it will grow this season.

Grafting/budding in summer is nice but for me, it didn’t save any time compared to grafting in winter. It’s still a good reason to visit @Stan or @Girly in summer in the guise of budwood and sample their fruits :laughing:

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@californicus @nil

Until I saw this guy, the mantra in my head was:

  1. Grafting is only with dormant wood from last year.
  2. Any grafting of scions must be done early in the year “as soon as the sap starts flowing”
  3. Any type of bud grafting is “wait til mext year”.

Each and every one of these got stood on its head, at least in my head.

He had 17 inches of growth in 7 weeks from this year’s scion wood

All I am saying is “when you least expect it, expect it” so keep your mind open because there may be someone out there who did not read the book that started off by saying “it is settled that…”

That’s all I am saying

Mike

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A while ago i looked up a lot of “side” grafting. Grafting a scion on the side of a stem, seemed really usful. Like is shown on the 2e video in this topic.

I am worried long term about the crotch angle/ bark inclusion of such a graft though. You could fix the crotch angle on the scion shoot. But fixing the crotch angle of the scion itself seems hard with that grafting technique.

I have tried a few, where i made the cut sideways at an 45 degree angle on the stem. And inserted the scion at that 45 degree angle (instead of straight up). The graft took. But time will tell if it will bark include.

To me it makes perfect sense you can graft with non dormant wood.
virtually all summer T-budding is done with non dormant wood.

For grafting you need enough callusing to fuse the 2 pieces together, and enough sapflow in the rootstock piece to force the callus cells to differentiate, before the scion runs out of resourches (starch/water). All those things happen faster/more in summer.

The main difference between summer and dormant grafting though is the hormonal balance of the tree.
In dormant grafting you graft in the dormant season, and when the tree wakes up it strats producing lots of cytokines, those usualy wake up the graft. In summer those get counteracted by the auxines produced by the rest of the tree and the “clasical” summer grafts thus stay dormant. However if you top the rest of the tree. The hormonal disbalance will likely force the graft to grow and grow fast.

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1998, I did a 4-flap ‘banana graft’ of J.Yoder#1 shagbark hickory onto pecan understock in early-mid July; non-dormant scion onto non-dormant rootstock. Not something I generally do, but it was my first chance at budwood from that cultivar.
Removed all leaves from the scion, wrapped w/Parafilm, and, IIRC, shaded w/ aluminum foil.

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